ONE Cultural Capital

ONE Cultural Capital Hamburg, Hannover, Göttingen, and Kassel. There were other trains: the tracks to the dull marshy west toward Bremen and Osnabruck ¨ (change for Amsterdam), or the maddeningly slow and infrequent service to Berlin, whose cars were always crowded with students. There was the boat-train north to Denmark and the local to L übeck. But this was the one we took most often from our temporary home, the white and bullet-nosed InterCity Express that dropped south at a speed America could only dream of—Hamburg to Frankfurt in three hours and a half, Munich in just over six. Though today I wasn’t going quite so far. “Gr üssen Sie Th üringen von mir,” the happy pink-faced conductor had said when he punched my ticket. Say hello to Thuringia for me. He was young and plump, with a ginger mustache; I had trouble with his accent and wondered when he’d left. In the café car, I spread the Herald-Tribune under coffee and rolls and looked up from “Doonesbury” as, south of Hannover, the north German lowlands began to ripple into hills. I finished my breakfast and the ripples turned into folds, the hills began to offer something like a prospect. A landscape has to be uneven before you can see it—the bands of fields and forests, the villages settled in valleys, confined and bordered, framed, and yet because of that open and legible, in a way that the flat countryside around Hamburg almost never is. Then the train was at Gottingen,¨ the university town of the Brothers Grimm, unvisited. And then Kassel, where six months before Brigitte had led me around the Documenta, building after building of oddly undemanding con- temporary art. Kassel: change for Weimar. It was a slow train now, along rivers and through tight-packed hills, a postcard landscape with every town tucked neatly in a bend of the stream, unbombed and old-fashioned and no longer quite so gray as they would have been when this was still the East. And then Weimar. I wheeled my bag downhill from the station, past the set of brooding administrative buildings that the Na- zis had built, along the tree-lined Schillerstrasse, through the crowded Marktplatz with its vendors of fruit and Fleisch and blue Bohemian pottery, and into the lobby of the Hotel Elephant. And so began my jog around this small and architecturally mod- est city that has nevertheless figured on the traveller’s shopping list for two centuries and more. Every reader of German litera- ture knows the story: how the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, widowed young and ambitious in a way that her son’s small realm couldn’t satisfy, started inviting poets and thinkers to make their home in his capital. Wieland came, to serve as tutor to Anna Amalia’s son Karl August, and Herder took over the city’s largest church. The most important invita- tion, however, was that extended by the young duke himself, who in 1775 picked out the day’s hottest talent and asked him to visit, a writer who though only in his twenties was already a bestseller, a notorious maker of taste and of fashion. Goethe came, he saw, he stayed. He picked up a title, supervised Weimar’s finances, es- tablished the theater, chaired the War Commission, oversaw the duchy’s mines, and always, always kept his pen moving. Schiller joined him 1787, and long after Goethe’s death the place re- mained attractive enough to become Liszt’s base of operations. Now you can buy their faces on plates and mugs, and in Goethe’s case on much more besides. He has, for example, given 2 ● CHAPTER ONE his name to a popular mark of brandy, whose labels carry a detail from the portrait that his friend Tischbein did in Rome: the poet in a wide-brimmed gray hat that turns him into something like a German gaucho. In fact Tischbein’s Goethe is as much an icon in Germany as Gilbert Stuart’s Washington is in America. I’ve seen it on the sign of an Italian restaurant in Berlin and on a mirror advertising a brand of beer, while Andy Warhol once modeled a poster on it, whose hot pink and yellow make the poet look as though he were his own acid trip. It is in truth a very bad pic- ture—not in the handling of the face, where Tischbein has per- fectly caught Goethe’s long straight typically Teutonic nose, but in the body, whose legs are comically out of proportion. Much better is the simpler portrait that Angelica Kauffman did on that same Italian journey, in which Goethe looks both less grand and more interesting, full-faced and with his brown hair pulled back, hatless and dark-eyed and shrewdly sensual. The Weimar of today isn’t the city in which Goethe lived, but it is an elaboration of it, a town decked out with memorials to the one he lived in. I’ve never been in a place so small that had so many statues and monuments. Goethe and Schiller, standing in bronze together in front of the theater; Karl August on horse- back, done up as though he were Marcus Aurelius; the plaque put up for Bach, who spent almost a decade here: all these one understands. Yet Shakespeare? Did he visit too? Indeed the whole atmosphere reminds me of Stratford—no, that’s unfair. Stratford can offer nothing beyond the bare fact of Shakespeare’s birth and death. He lived and worked elsewhere, and not much is known about any of it; so the city, having only what Henry James called “The Birthplace,” in all its odd mingling of presence and absence, has rushed to fill the vacuum with that peculiar English genius for the tacky souvenir. Weimar has almost nothing tacky about it, there’s hardly even any kitsch beyond those plates and something called a “Goethe barometer.” Nor has the town’s poet given his name to an undistinguished bit of chocolate-covered marzipan, as Mozart has in Salzburg. There are souvenirs aplenty—but they CULTURAL CAPITAL ● 3 sit next to full racks of books, and it’s the latter that seem to have the quickest turnover. For there is no vacuum here. Imagine a Shakespeare about whom everything was known: his letters to his parents and his notes to Jonson or Donne, his wife’s relations with some third person, a secretary’s record of what he thought about Marlowe and said to the Queen, or even what he ate on Thursdays. Imagine that and you will have the six thousand pages of Rob- ert Steiger’s Goethe’s Life from Day to Day, a documentary record, in eight volumes, of the letters Goethe wrote and received, the hours of statecraft, the conversations with Eckermann and others, the poems he worked on and the guests he saw. Goethe was from a very early age a tourist attraction in his own right: everybody who came to Weimar wanted to meet him, and everybody wrote about it, as though he were the Colosseum or Ni- agara Falls. Of all the reminiscences, the one I like most is that of Thackeray, who arrived in Weimar in 1830, two years before the poet’s death. The Englander¨ was just nineteen; he had left Cam- bridge without a degree and was busy squandering his fortune. Drifting through Europe he found that he liked the statelet’s re- laxed approach to morality and stayed for six months; it later became the “Pumpernickel” of Vanity Fair. He thought the court’s sense of protocol absurd, but for any visiting Englishman who seemed (still) to have money, it was nevertheless “most pleasant and homely,” and so he worked away at flirting in Ger- man and bought a sword alleged to have been Schiller’s. Eventu- ally, with what he called a “perturbation of spirit,” he found himself presented to the genius of the place. He must have been one of the last Englishmen to have seen the poet plain and wrote that he could imagine “nothing more serene, majestic, and healthy looking than the grand old Goethe,” noting in particular the “awful splendour” of his eyes. But he added, in a letter to his mother, that the German, though “a noble poet . is little better than an old rogue” and was both astonished and “somewhat re- lieved” to find that he “spoke French with not a good accent.” 4 ● CHAPTER ONE Twenty years later, another English writer who wasn’t yet fa- mous came to Weimar. Marian Evans had just run away with G. H. Lewes; it was 1854 and it would be a few years yet before she turned herself into George Eliot. They spent three months in the town, while Lewes worked on his still-readable biography of Goethe, three months in a place that, though there were as yet few statues up, was already busy turning itself into a memorial. They met Clara Schumann, whose husband had just been shut away, and Liszt, whose playing made her feel that “for the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration.” But for Evans—Eliot— Weimar had “a charm independent” of the great names associ- ated with it. Even allowing for the fact that she was on her hon- eymoon, I’m inclined to agree and to locate that charm precisely where she did: in the park that lies along the Ilm, Weimar’s little stream, and which ran from the Duke’s Schloss in town to the rococo hilltop villa called the Belvedere a few miles to the south.

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